By John HannahJohn Hannah is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on U.S. strategy. During the presidency of George W. Bush, he served for eight years on the staff of Vice President Cheney, including as the vice president's national security advisor.

November 29, 2013 - 10:17 am

Pundits and policymakers are missing the big worry about the Obama administration’s Iranian nuclear deal: its greatest impact is not ensuring that Iran doesn’t get the bomb, but that the Saudis will.

Indeed, the risk of arms race in the Middle East — on a nuclear hair trigger — just went up rather dramatically. And it increasingly looks like the coming Sunni-Shiite war will be nuclearized.

Two aspects of the agreement, in particular, will consolidate Saudi fears that an Iranian bomb is now almost certainly coming to a theater near them. First, the pre-emptive concession that the comprehensive solution still to be negotiated will leave Iran with a permanent capability to enrich uranium — the key component of any program to develop nuclear weapons. In the blink of an eye, and without adequate notice or explanation to key allies who believe their national existence hangs in the balance, the United States appears to have fatally compromised the long-standing, legally-binding requirements of at least five United Nations Security Council resolutions. If the Saudis needed any confirmation that last month’s rejection of a Security Council seat was merited — on grounds that U.S. retrenchment has rendered the organization not just irrelevant, but increasingly dangerous to the kingdom’s core interests — they just got it, in spades.

Second, the agreement suggests that even the comprehensive solution will be time-limited. In other words, whatever restrictions are eventually imposed on Iran’s nuclear program won’t be permanent. The implication is quite clear: At a point in time still to be negotiated (three years, five, ten?) and long after the international sanctions regime has been dismantled, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program will be left unshackled, free to enjoy the same rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty as any other member in good standing. That looks an awful lot like a license to one day build an industrial-size nuclear program, if Iran so chooses, with largely unlimited ability to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium, a la Japan.

But of course Iran is not Japan — a peaceful, stable democracy aligned with the West. It is a bloody-minded, terror-sponsoring, hegemony-seeking revisionist power that has serially violated its non-proliferation commitments and which aims to destroy Israel, drive America out of the Middle East, and bring down the House of Saud.

Whether or not President Obama fully appreciates that distinction, the Saudis most definitely do.

Of course, Saudi concerns extend well beyond the four corners of last week’s agreement. For Riyadh, Iran’s march toward the bomb is only the most dangerous element — the coup de grace in its expanding arsenal, if you will — of an ongoing, region-wide campaign to overturn the Middle East’s existing order in favor of one dominated by Tehran. The destabilization and weakening of Saudi Arabia is absolutely central to that project, and in Saudi eyes has been manifested in a systematic effort by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to extend its influence and tentacles near and far, by sowing violence, sabotage, terror, and insurrection — in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and most destructively of all, in the IRGC’s massive intervention to abet the slaughter in Syria and salvage the regime of Bashar al-Assad.